Art Pope, the right-wing extremist, multimillionaire owner of low-end retail outlets, Roses and Maxway stores, in eastern North Carolina, spent $2.2 million on local legislative races in 2010 and flipped the N.C. Legislature from blue to red for the first since 1870.
Jane Mayer profiles him in the New Yorker:
From Dave Weigel:
Occupy Wall Street has overflowed to, of all places, Sarasota, Fla. About 100 people gathered on Main Street in front of Bank of America (as if they don’t already have enough troubles) and waved signs in varying degrees of legibility and spellfulness.
Who knew the sleepy little Gulf Coast town was a hotbed of radicalism?
I happened to catch a few minutes of this interview with Mitt Romney by the editorial board of the Union Leader, a Republican newspaper in New Hampshire, on C-SPAN the other day. It had been a while since I’d heard Romney speak extemporaneously outside the debate setting, and I had forgotten how badly he presents himself. (The stammer is a particularly galling affectation meant to convey earnestness.)
Had I been able to stomach the entire thing, I would have caught a moment of supreme weaselry, when Romney was asked about the active-duty soldier in Iraq who was booed by tea baggers at the Republican presidential debate in Orlando earlier this month:
When the #OccupyWallStreet protestors get tired of the financial district, they can always hoof it over to Madison Avenue, where in one of life’s little ironies, Advertising Week is kicking off.
Even as runaway greed is lambasted on Wall Street, festering consumerism is encouraged at the eighth annual seminar/festival/networking event for more than 70,000 advertising professionals and major clients.
As in every past year, multiculturalism in advertising will be applauded yet rarely utilized. One workshop entitled, “Where Are All the Black People?” shows that at ad agencies, things haven’t changed very much since the days of Mad Men. The biggest difference, of course, is that the early Madison Avenue types didn’t have to sit through endless discussion groups about social media “solutions.”
As the #OccupyWallStreet folks choke on tear gas and wave signs about bailouts and being in the 99 percent, ad industry types, who facilitate the consumer desire that lines Wall Street pockets, will be entertained by Andrea Mitchell and Brian Williams of NBC News, along with Steve Harvey, Jennifer Hudson, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Justin Timberlake.
The futility of the entire situation might have been unwittingly captured in this tweet from @KYColChad:
From the Murdoch/News Corp (R-Hacking) owned New York Post:
After months of hedging, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is giving serious thought to jumping into the ring for a GOP presidential run — and could make his decision next week, The Post has learned.
The announcement may come as soon as Monday, said sources familiar with Christieâs thinking.
The renewed consideration about a White House run came after prodding this week from some Republicans he idolizes, including former First Lady Nancy Reagan, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and former President George W. Bush, sources said.
There’s been a lot of chatter about the difference in the “liberal” media’s wall-to-wall coverage of the rise of the tea party mobs in 2009 and its failure to cover the Occupy Wall Street movement today.
There are several reason for this, including the fact that tea partyists signaled that they were on the verge of violence from the outset. First, they put their propensity toward violence on display by showing up in a succession of congressional town halls where they indulged in fits of rage, supposedly over government spending, directed at their representatives. Then they began showing up armed outside venues for presidential events and other political gatherings fully armed.
“If it bleeds, it leads” in journalism. And the corporate media could not risk not being on the scene when some nutcase finally popped off and attacked a politician — except of course, there were no reporters around when that finally happened, to Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in Tucson, in January 2011, nearly two years after the tea bagger summer.
Media Matters points to another reason Occupy Wall Street is not getting the same coverage as the tea baggers did early on — the tea party was sponsored indirectly by Fox News, which gave it virtually wall-to-wall coverage that first year:
We’d like to think of something to add to this post, but the sign says it all.
In the Fox News debate last week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry apparently drove his junker presidential candidate off a cliff after he described tea baggers who don’t want to educate undocumented children who have grown up in the United States as “heartless.”
But if the tea partyists found Perry’s “compassionate conservative” position on undocumented children to be a deal killer, wait’ll they get a load of these five left-leaning positions held by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the latest GOP presidential heartthrob:
His celebrity is not wanin’ â it’s waxin’!
And it’s the limelight where Marco Rubio’s been baskin’.
But he sure is quite adamant,
That he won’t be vice president.
Funny, I don’t recall that any candidate had asked him.
Except they’re dead wrong. Michael Linden, at the Center for American Progress, crunched the numbers.
In the past 60 years, job growth has actually been greater in years when the top income tax rate was much higher than it is now.
For instance, in years when the top marginal rate was more than 90 percent, the average annual growth in total payroll employment was 2 percent. In years when the top marginal rate was 35 percent or lessâwhich it is nowâemployment grew by an average of just 0.4 percent.
And thereâs no cherry-picking here. Pick any threshold. When the marginal tax rate was 50 percent or above, annual employment growth averaged 2.3 percent, and when the rate was under 50, growth was half that.
In fact, if you ranked each year since 1950 by overall job growth, the top five years would all boast marginal tax rates at 70 percent or higher. The top 10 years would share marginal tax rates at 50 percent or higher. The two worst years, on the other hand, were 2008 and 2009, when the top marginal tax rate was 35 percent. In the 13 years that the top marginal tax rate has been at its current level or lower, only one year even cracks the top 20 in overall job creation.
According to Internal Revenue Service data, the entire taxable income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1.582 trillion. Even if all these Americans – most of whom are far from wealthy – were taxed at 100%, it wouldn’t cover Mr. Obama’s deficit for this year.
And here’s what the WSJ said when it was pointed out by FactCheck.org that they were wrong.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the total taxable income of Americans earning over $100,000 in 2008 was $1.582 trillion. The correct figure is $3.4 trillion.
The projected deficit is $1.645 trillion. You do the math.
But Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Ok.), apparently can’t, because he repeated the false claim on a recent FOX News Sunday segment, with an added twist about the futility of including those who net between $100,00 and $250,000 after deductions. The point was to show that the deficit problem can only be solved by cutting spending, not by also increasing revenues. People who are not mathematically — or ideologically — challenged see that it will take both.
Pres. Obama is proposing $2 trillion in spending cuts and $1 trillion in additional tax revenue over 12 years. Seems reasonable to us.
From his 2005 book, Winning the Future: “You have the right to be part of the lowest-cost insurance pool and you have a responsibility to buy insurance… We need some significant changes to ensure that every American is insured, but we should make it clear that a 21st Century Intelligent System requires everyone to participate in the insurance system.”
